Here we are.

It’s impossible to overemphasize the role of luck in those three words. So many sheer flukes: pure, blind, zillion-to-one chance, allowing you to read this, just as I now sit here in Old Town Coffee & Chocs watching words appear on my iPad. Five examples:

Getting going

Blind luck led to the start of life on Earth nearly four billion years ago. Through a series of uncountable permutations and combinations, the precursor molecules of life somehow fashioned themselves into an arrangement that reproduced itself. (This particular fluke may have happened more than once, since it probably took many attempts to start the four-billion year chain. All but the final version would have been wiped out by the then-frequent bombardments of massive comets and asteroids.)

Sex, Part 1

Untold numbers of reproductions over four billion years—first by mitosis (self-reproduction) and later by sexual interweaving of genetic material—resulted in the two humans you know as Mom and Dad. If just one of those reproductions had misfired, you wouldn’t be reading this.

Back to the Future

And for that matter, what are the odds of your parents not meeting?

Sex, Part 2

Of some five million not-quite-identical spermatozoa that started a race to your Mom’s waiting egg about [your age + nine months] time ago, what was so special about that one particular little bugger that won?

Good for Us, Bad for Them

65 million years ago—a blink of geological time—an asteroid the size of Manhattan Island slammed into our planet (off the northern coast of the Yucatan peninsula) leading to global devastation. [Illustration below by my pal Mike Carroll.] Casualties included every dinosaur then alive, not counting birds. Mammals, which until then had been small and mostly nocturnal, survived—and thrived in newly vacant ecological niches. Eventually they branched out into hundreds of new species, including ours (I can’t write homo sapiens without snickering.) Had that asteroid missed, no LoCO, no you, no me.

That’s pretty long odds to produce you, multiplied by the same odds to produce me.  Yeah, I know, we could take the other tack and agree that the fact that we are here demonstrates that the odds are 100%. We could. But — it being Sunday (probably) —l et’s not. Just for a minute, let’s celebrate.

Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you’d think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. (Lewis Thomas)

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Barry Evans gave the best years of his life to civil engineering, and what thanks did he get? In his dotage, he travels, kayaks, meditates and writes for the Journal and the Humboldt Historian. He sucks at 8 Ball. Buy his Field Notes anthologies at any local bookstore. Please.